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Debt Bill Is Signed, Ending a Fractious Battle

President Obama spoke from the Rose Garden after the Senate vote on the debt ceiling bill on Tuesday.Credit
Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Tuesday to raise the government’s debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars from its spending, concluding a long and fractious partisan battle just hours before the government’s borrowing authority was set to run out.

The bill, which passed 74 to 26, was immediately signed by President Obama, who took a final shot at his Republican opposition for what he called a manufactured — and avoidable — crisis. “Voters may have chosen divided government,” he said, “but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government.”

Voters will render their verdicts on the merits of divided government next year, but its impact is now abundantly clear: the agenda of the 112th Congress will be dominated by continuous fighting over spending priorities and regulation, with a high bar for big debates on foreign policy and other domestic issues coming to the fore.

“When was the last time anybody said anything about Libya?” said Representative Phil Gingrey, a Republican from Georgia who was first elected in 2002. “This is the way it is going to be until the election.”

In the seven months since the change of power in the House, the Washington discourse has shifted almost completely from the decades-long battle between both parties over how to allocate government resources to jousting over the moral high ground on imposing austerity, with seemingly none of the political or practical motivations that have historically driven legislation.

Republicans, though controlling only one-third of the process through their majority in the House, appear to have firmly snagged the upper hand in the legislative dynamics, largely because of their unwillingness to sacrifice ground even when their stance threatens both the government’s ability to operate and pay its debts, and their own prospects for retaining their jobs.

“The difference is the intensity here,” said David R. Mayhew, a political science professor at Yale. “The Republicans have the Tea Party, and the Democrats don’t have anything of comparable animation on their side.”

Democrats, hamstrung in part by Congressional procedures and hewing to more traditional methods of compromise and negotiation, allowed Republicans to pull the center of debate much closer to their priorities.

“We could draw parallels and distinctions with other tumultuous times such as the Civil War,” Glen Browder, a former congressman from Alabama and professor emeritus at Jacksonville State University, said in an e-mail. “But I do believe that this is something different from most Democrat-Republican struggles in our recent history. The traditional game of politics in which the two sides contest over control of issues and decisions for core constituencies has erupted into an intense struggle with critical ideological/philosophical divisions about what America means and how America ought to work.”

The compromise over the debt ceiling, which the House passed on Monday, has been denounced by Democrats as being tilted too heavily toward Republican priorities, mainly because it does not raise any new revenues as it reduces budget deficits by at least $2.1 trillion in the next 10 years. But it attracted the votes of many Democrats, if only because the many months of standoff had brought the country perilously close to default.

On Tuesday evening, Moody’s Investors Service appeared to echo the mixed feelings in Congress about the deal, saying it was not going to immediately lower the government’s AAA credit rating but also officially signaled that it was prepared to downgrade it unless more is done to deal with the deficit.

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TimesCast | Debt Bill Becomes Law

President Obama signed into law the bill to raise the government's debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars in spending.

The wrangling in Congress also laid bare divisions within both parties, with the final passage in the Senate relying on the votes of the remaining center of each party — 28 Republicans, 45 Democrats and one independent voted aye — with the most right- and left-leaning members left ultimately on the sidelines.

In the Senate, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Mike Lee of Utah, both Republican freshmen blessed by the Tea Party, voted against the bill, mirroring their counterparts in the House, including a third of that chamber’s freshmen.

On the left, six Democrats and one independent rejected the bill, arguing that it placed too much burden on middle- and lower-income Americans. Among the Democrats who opposed the measures were reliable liberals like Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey, but also Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who voted in contrast to the senior member from her state, Senator Charles E. Schumer.

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The last senator to vote Tuesday was Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, who conferred intensely for several minutes with Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, then voted yes, as he had done. Ms. Snowe, a moderate Republican who faces re-election next year, is already a target of Tea Party activists in her state.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, who played a central role in arriving at the ultimate compromise, said his party’s goal was “to get as much spending cuts as we could from a government we didn’t control.” Of the legislation, he said: “It may have been messy. It may have appeared to some that their government wasn’t working, but in fact the opposite was true.”

On Capitol Hill on Tuesday, the conversation quickly shifted to a powerful new committee that will be created to recommend ways to reduce deficits by a total of at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Congressional leaders have two weeks to appoint the 12 members, who are supposed to come up with an ambitious deficit-reduction package by Nov. 23.

The committee, which many members will no doubt jockey to join, was the underlying cause of opposition to the bill by some on both sides. “I do not like the supercommittee,” said Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska. “It’s just a convoluted maze to do things in Washington the usual Washington way.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, presaged the next Congressional battle by rejecting the assertions of his Republican colleagues that the next phase would again exclude revenue increases, which the Democrats failed to include in the first round. “That’s not going to happen,” Mr. Reid said.

Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said the new joint committee “puts us in a much better position” to inject revenues into the debate.

Mr. Obama, too, called for an agreement that included new revenues, including higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the closing of corporate loopholes, saying he would fight for that approach as the Congressional commission considers what to recommend to Congress for an up-or-down vote before the end of the year, as the new law requires, or face steep cuts in programs dear to both parties.

Many Democrats believe their hand could actually be strengthened by the outcome of the debate. Because the agreement set the spending levels for next year’s budget, they believe a new round of fights will be averted.

However, each side will continue to have its own spending priorities, and those differences will be difficult to reconcile once the appropriators get down to the work of actual cuts. The frequent use among Republican senators of the filibuster will further complicate matters.

“If you hold one-half of one-third of the reins of power in Washington,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “and are willing to use and maintain that kind of discipline even if you will bring the entire temple down around your own head, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to get your way.”

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Debt Bill Signed, Ending Crisis and Fractious Battle. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe